It’s the last Friday of winter break, and I was supposed to be spending this week at Florence Marina State Park—hiking, reading, and relaxing. And technically, I was there. But the cold and rain kept me inside most of the time, giving me an unexpected opportunity to immerse myself in oral history research again. So while my body was stuck inside, my mind was wandering the campus of Gordon Military College in the 1960s.
And if I’m honest, part of me wanted to be there.
The way the cadets told it, Gordon was magic. The marching, the rituals, the discipline—it was a world of crisp uniforms, polished boots, and military balls that shimmered like something out of a storybook. There was an order to everything, a sense of belonging woven into the very fabric of the school. The sponsor system—where female students were chosen to represent companies of cadets, wearing elegant gowns and standing beside their assigned group of young men—felt like the pinnacle of it all. I wanted to be a sponsor. I wanted to go to the Military Ball, to step into that carefully constructed world and see it for myself.
But then, I did.
I walked through Gordon in the only way time travel allows—through the stories of those who had been there. I spent hours with people who had lived it, whose memories painted a very different picture. I heard about the cafeteria, where white students would get up and move if a Black student sat down, until, one day, the Black students strategically scattered themselves so there was nowhere else to sit. I learned about a fundraiser, which I can’t write about here, but it was part of a school event. When the Black students pooled their money to engage in nonviolent resistance the administration had no choice but to cancel the fundraiser entirely.
This was Gordon, too.
Before I became a professor, I saw Gordon like a snow globe—magical, beautiful, inaccessible. As a community member, I was on the outside looking in. When I interviewed for a full-time faculty position, I told them that part of my goal was to open some doors, to invite the community back into the world inside the glass. But what I didn’t know then was that at one point, there was no divide between the school and the town. Gordon Military was the high school for the city of Barnesville. You couldn’t have one without the other. The institution and the community had been inextricably linked—until history was rewritten to make it seem otherwise.
And little did I know, I would be led into a research project that uncovered all of that, only to then be shut out again.
That’s the thing about snow globes. They’re designed to be admired from a distance, to preserve a particular vision of a place, frozen in time. But shake them hard enough, and the illusion breaks.
I’ve been thinking a lot about illusions, about control, about the power of reshaping reality through storytelling. Maybe that’s why, in the midst of all of this, I’ve been reading Wild Seed by Octavia Butler and I Love Myself by Zora Neale Hurston. Butler’s characters shift and transform, slipping in and out of identities, testing the boundaries of power. Hurston’s words remind me that knowing yourself, truly knowing yourself, is its own form of defiance.
So here I am, at the end of winter break, having spent a week in two different worlds. One where I was supposed to be relaxing by the water, and another where I was walking through history, uncovering the memories buried beneath official records.
I think it’s obvious which place I actually visited.
